Dabanese 2008. Syntax.

A dabanese reader/writer, dabaner for short, has to know only four notions and the simple syntax rules. The notions are:

• ideogram
• unordered daba phrase
• ordered daba phrase
• accent (subject)

Now the rules:

1. ideogram is a daba phrase;
2. a finite sequence of daba phrases enclosed between braces, {...}, is a daba phrase – it's called an unordered phrase;
3. a finite sequence of daba phrases enclosed between parentheses, (...), is a daba phrase – it's called an ordered phrase;
4. a daba phrase enclosed in brackets, [...], is a daba phrase – it's called an accented phrase or a subject;
5. all daba phrases are obtained by a finite application of rules 1-4.

All elements of dabanese should be separated by white spaces (or they may be separated by some other graphic device).

Phrases { A B C } and { B C A } are in principle equivalent, they have the same meaning in dabanese, the difference is at the most artistic and similar. When you quote a daba text then you may change the order of subphrases in the unordered phrases (unless there is a claim of the completely exact quoting). In particular it is legal to change the order of subphrases in unordered phrases when quoting in legal situations. On the other hand you must preserve the order of subpphrases of the ordered daba phrase, when you quote them even in informal situations or otherwise it is not a quote. Any change of order in ordered phrase is likely to result in a drastic change of its meaning. Claiming to be quoting when changing on purpose the order in ordered phrases would be cheating, while an inadvertent change would be an irresponsible sloppiness.

Rules 2. and 3. applied to the empty sequence give us phrases { } and ( ), which stand for "nothing" or for emptiness, etc. There will be dabanese dictionaries but there always will be the room for the customary poetic interpretation of the text by the dabaners, depending on the context, just as in the natural languages. For instance, [ hmn ] phrase tells us that human is the subject (of the respective portion of a daba text), as in { ( ) [ hmn] }, which points perhaps to a human who does not represent anything, who is totally uninteresting. Now let's consider phrase [ [ hmn ] ], with a double accent. To me it means that the topic is the attention on human, while I am afraid that to many people it will mean an extra strong accent on human. Thus daba phrase { ( ) [ [ hmn ] ] } means to me something like "an empty (useless) attention on human", while to others it may mean that especially all or some or particular human is silly (more silly than non-humans or other humans), with the extra emphasis on the group which is meant. Possibly, the same phrases will mean different things to different people.

Dabanese cannot and does not attempt to define every reading of the dabanese text. For instance someone may talk about arithmetic calculations using the infix notation ( 2 + 5 ), and another may use the postfix ( 2 5 + ). it is up to dabaners to understand each other. In the given text they should use the ordered phrase in each case. But if they want to make sure to be understood they may add an extra description: let ideogram rPn stand for the reversed Polish notation. Then one may write { rPn ( 2 5 + ) }. Perhaps the best is to write it as follows: { 2 5 [ + ] }. Now it is pretty clear. The subject is sum, but it is a sum described by 2 and 5, so it is 7. Then phrases { 2 [ + ] 5 } and { [ + ] 5 2 } mean the same, i.e. 7. A different meaning would have a phrase like ( [2] + 5) – it would mean something like: 2, to which 5 was/is/will be added.

A daba phrase without any subject (i.e. when none of its subjects are accented; even when a subject of a subject may be accented) are called lists – there are ordered and unordered lists. A daba phrase may have more than one accent but it is not advised. A strict daba phrase should have at the most one accent. If you want to have more than one then do it for instance as follows: { A B [ { C D } ] } rather than by { A B [ C ] [ D] }, but it's up to you.

Dabanese 2008. Pigeon ideograms.

(I see the "New Post" user option, but not "Edit" user option - how frustrating since I want to correct typos spontaneously, when I see them).

I'll write about dabanese from scratch. Writing from scratch is my weakness. After a break I am incapable to just continue.

I'll start to create a dictionary of ideograms, still in their pigeon form. For the sake of convenience I'll consider all English and Polish nouns, in their main form, and noun like words, as pigeon ideograms. However, some ideograms will start to have a legal status. At least conceptually (not graphically). Here we go (ideograms in the same line are synonymous):

• := – ideogram of definition.
• { {} := { } } – this dabanese definition tells us that ideogram {} stands for nothing or Polish nic. Actually, () and nic are synonymous ideograms for nothing, i.e. each of them is legally equivalent to ideogram {}:
  () – synonym of {};
  nic – synonym of {};
  
• daba – the ideogram for everything, as well as for the (universal) data base daba:
  ∀ – synonym for the ideogram daba.
  
• self – ideogram of the reference of the source of the given dabanese phrase.
  się – synonym of the ideogram self.
  

I need to go now. Thus let me just collect cleanly the dictionary so far, without explanations:

• :=
  
• {} () nic
• daba ∀
• self się

Let's remember that ideograms, as well as all records of daba, are partially ordered in daba (regardless of being primary ideograms or derived ideograms; the position of data record in daba sheds additional light onto its meaning). Now I need to go.

2008-June

I am slowly, a bit at the time, learning about the details of this blog's logistic (of the user interface). E.g. I just saw the "new post" menu option at the top of this blog window. Such small details can keep me back. I am hopeless.

I ran into (Artur P)'s blog. Somehow it had a very positive influence on me, made me come back here too, and to take another look at my present situation. Perhaps, with a bit of discipline, I can still squeeze from myself a bit of consistent, constructive effort. My main problem is, or I should mbeliwve that it is psychological. Since Biblical time people understand the necessity of Sabbath or Sunday, and of the holidays, while for years I have none of them. However, iof I somehow fool myself into pretending that I have some, then perhaps I will get going a bit instead of having excuses. Chess players are especially good in making excuses. In this respect I am by far a world champion (otherwise I am another poor, club level chess player).

As a first step let me write some of my present projects and activities (besides assisting my father):

• I participate in a private Internet forum for my school classmates. There are fewer and fewer of us left. The forum has strictly sentimental value. But so what? Isn't it about being humans (for better or worse), and not just about achievements etc? There were really only 7 of us active (on and off). Now it's 9. Others are lurking or not involved (while formally all classmates are automatically among participants, if their email is known).
• I have started to write, in TeX :-), a consecutive article for Delta. This time about the magic squares. I have go back to it.
• I should truly concentrate on my dabanese language, especially, that I got Artur interested (at least for the moment).
• I should go back to writing about my "The art of agreement". In particular, I have written recently 4 installments in Polish for an electronic zine, and I should continue. Somehow that zine is not making the writing process attractive. I should still continue.
• A reincarnation of a poetic Polish portal is in making. Somehow participants are passive. The main force of the project, PŁ, set up a deadline around June 20 something. I should finish writing the statue of that portwal without worrying about inactivity of others. If that portal did happen I would feel real good, hopefully I would write there my more complete view of poetry (it goes back to the old views on poetry). I wish such a nice portal existed in the past, not just for poetry but also in other domains - the quality of my life (and of others, I believe) would be higher.

Well, enough, I better stop now. Sure, I have other projects too, infinitely many of them :-), be it public projects like education or private like physical exercise, better eating and sleeping habits, etc. Unrealistic. On the top of it another infinity of mathematical projects. Sounds crazy but I am too lazy too be crazy. I simply wish I had my peace of mind to learn some profound pieces of mathematics. unrealistic, and this time I feel sad. I would need good conditions to truly get into hard mathematical problems. I don't think that disciplpine alone is enough. I would need discipline anyway, even under favorable circumstances.

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Artur's blog is interesting. In particular, he has poetic photos of the Cracow's suburbs, Kazimierz & Pogórze.

Preschool mathematics

Outstretch two fingers of your left hand, and three of the right. Ask you child: which is greater?

Now, do not count. Just match the outstretched left fingers with the right ones. One right finger will be left unmatched. Thus there were more fingers on the right than on the left.

Repeat this exercise with different combinations of the outstretched fingers. Even when you ask about three and three fingers, you may still use different combinations of the three fingers.

Now show your child:

* * *
* * *
* * *

versus

* * * *
* * * *

and ask, which is greater?

You may rearrange the patterns as follows

* * *

* * *
* * *

versus

* * * *
* * * *

The answer is clear.

Conclusion: you don't need to count to compare.

Do the same for other squares and rectangles, e.g. for 5x5 versus 4x6, or for 4x5 versus 3x6, etc. Even small children can do these comparisons, since they do not need to count. What's more important, this way is not boring. It gives an insight into mathematics (set theory, geometry, algebra).

dabanese - a general introduction

Daba is the universal data base, which (potentially) contains all existing information. Dabanese is the language of daba. It is an international written language. The readers and writers of dabanese are called dabaers. For the children of the near future dabanese will be their first written language.

Dabaers can be nicely assisted by computers because computers can parse dabanese. Computers can help dabaers in many ways, to a dramatically greater extent than they can assist people in using natural languages.

Dabanese is in many ways a new Chinese language. It uses ideograms, called dabagrams, but dabanese is written from left to right, like the Western languages.

Once a dabagram is accepted by the official dabanese, it stays there, unaltered, forever. Actually, underneath each dabagram there is an invisible daba record. Daba records and dabagrams are partially ordered in a conceptual way, from the most general concept daba toward the more and more detailed notions.

The evolution of daba and dabanese is always backward compatible. The syntax of dabanese can only expand but it never changes otherwise. Once there is a dabagram or a dabatext or a daba record, they will exist forever, and a dabatext will be parsed forever in the same way. The meaning has to change over the time. There is no such thing as completely fixed meaning. The world changes, the people change, hence the notion of fixed meaning is meaningless. Nevertheless dabanese is more stable than natural languages - partly due to the stable syntax, and partly because you cannot drastically change a meaning of an existing phrase, as it happens in natural languages all the time. You can only introduce new dabaphrases and even new dabagrams. Potentially, there is an infinite supply of them.

I have described the main portion of the dabanese syntax in dabanese, 1.

Dabagrams will have their crude, legal format, and also artistic formats (fonts). At this moment I don't have proper software and graphics hence I will use pigeon dabagrams. The first (pigeon) dabagram is daba. It stands for everything. But the first two dabaphrases are:

{ }   and   ( )

where there is nothing (white space) between the parentheses. The meaning of these phrases is nothingness.

Dabaphrase { daba [ human ] } means almost the same as simply human, but it puts a stress on talking about all humans. On the other hand the dabaphrase { [ daba ] human } stands for everything which is related to humans (e.g. clothes, human emotions, science, poetry, sport, family life, friendships, ...). Indeed, this time the emphasis (brackets) is about daba, and the (pigeon) dabagram human only describes the daba in question.

The next ideogram is :=. It stands for definition. A relatively small number of dabagrams are primary, meaning that they are not defined by earlier dabagrams. The majority of dabagrams are introduced by macros, as follows:

( [ () ] := ( ) )

( [ {} ] := { } )

Thus from now on we do no need to use a whole phrase like ( ) or { } to mention nothingness - we may use one of the ideograms () or {}, without a white space between the parentheses. In general, the macro definition has the following syntax:

( [ newDabagram ] := defDabaphrase )

Once we insert this dabaphrase in our dabatext, the newDabagram will stand for defDabaphrase from then on.

The external paretheses above mean that the order of the components of our dabaphrase is important, while the order of subphrases inside braces is not essential. For instance, phrase

{ mother [ father ] }

stands for the grandfather on the maternal side, an so does the dabaphrase

{ [ father ] mother }

while

{ [ mother ] father }

stands for the grandmothher on the father side. On the other hand, phrase

( LA [ movement ] NY )

is ordered, it stands for a travel (or whatever movement) from LA to NY, while

(  LA { child [ movement ] }  [ John ]  )

perhaps tells us about a John, to whom a child moved from LA - due to the syntax of the phrase (the bold font is used only to make it easier on the eyes), the main emphasis is on John, he is the subject of the whole phrase; the emphasis on movement is not global but only local, within its subphrase

{ child [ movement ] }

A longer daba text may be still written as a single dabaphrase, for instance it may be an ordered list like this:

    (
        dabaphrase_1
        dabaphrase_2
            ...
        dabaphrase_55
    )

The first and last parenthesis indicate that the appearing order of the 55 subphrases is essential. If such a phrase is a bit expanded, like this:

  { Tuesday
    [ (
        dabaphrase_1
        dabaphrase_2
            ...
        dabaphrase_55
    ) ]
  }

then it describes what has happened on Tuesday (or what happens on Tuesdays), while dabaphrase:

  { { Tuesday [ task ] }
    [ (
        dabaphrase_1
        dabaphrase_2
            ...
        dabaphrase_55
    ) ]
  }

describes what has to be done on Tuesday(s).

dabanese, 2

As of the moment, I don't have any dabanese software nor graphics. Thus in this sequence of posts I will use dabanese pigeon ideograms. Potentially, any concatenation of unicode symbols which does not include any white space, and which is not one of the single symbols ( ) { } [ ], can possibly serve as a pigeon ideogram. We already have two pigeon ideograms: () and {} — they stand for "nothingness". I will also use English and Polish nouns, mathematical symbols, etc. It goes without saying that pigeon ideograms, and dabanese characters in general, have to be separated in a dabanese phrase by white spaces, when rendered without graphics (once we have graphics, each ideogram will reside in its own distinct rectangle).

Consider the following two dabaphrases:

{ coldness [ water ] }

{ [ coldness ] water }

Due to the different emphasis, the first phrase means "cold water", while the second one — "water-like coldness". Indeed, the emphasis tells you what the phrase is about. The first one is about water, the second one about coldness.

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In this dabaseries of notes I will deal mainly with the strict dabanese. In the day to day communication the unordered phrases (meaningful more so than lists) will be the most common. Thus it is convenient to introduce a practical shortcut: it is allowed to remove the external braces of the unordered phrase just inside the emphasis brackets, e.g. phrase

{ John [ { mother father } ] }

can be simplified to:

{ John [ mother father ] }

Here the emphasized subphrase is an unordered list. Most likely this phrase means "John's mother and father". By the way, the latter English phrase is slightly ambigous to those who don't know English well; to them it may mean "John's mother and someone's father" (or John's mother and a priest). In general, parsing of the natural languages is not unique while it is always unique for dabanese (which is a trivial theorem).

Polish noun for "movement" is short "ruch" (approximately pronounced roogh). Let's use it as a daba pigeon ideogram:

{ { [ ruch ] { foot foot } } [ Mary ] }

{ { [ North [ ruch ] ] { foot Friday } } [ Mary ] }

Yes, good graphics would help us a lot to parse dabanese phrases. Anyway, both phrases are about Mary ("Mary" is emphasized). The first phrase tells us that she is moving her feet (most likely her own, that's a natural default). Perhaps she's walking or running, or possibly she's sitting or even lying down and swinging her feet. More detailed meaning depends on the context (on other phrases of the longer text).

The second phrase is a bit more specific. It is concerned with a Mary, who is walking or running toward North on Friday (or on Fridays). Possibly she jogs to her friend most every Friday (and gets a ride home Saturday morning, who knows). To interpret this phrase as a one-foot movement wouild be possible but rather silly. As in natural languages, we get a lot of room for interpretation, and we rely on the common sense (not always succesfully).

One more example. Let =/= be the ideogram standing for "not equal". Let's also use Yr for "year". Then (we will use two lines to write one more complex phrase):

{  { { 2002 [ Yr ] } [ John ] }  { { 2007 [ Yr ] } [ John ] }
            [ =/= ]  }

is a way (perhaps clumsy) of saying that John from the year 2002 and from the 2007 year is not the same, that perhaps he has changed, or perhaps the phrase informs us that there are two different Johns. We may switch the emphasis from the change in John to John himself (this time there will be the same John, unless a symbolic John is meant, a John of all Johns):

{  { { 2002 [ Yr ] }  { { 2007 [ Yr ] }  [ =/= ] }  [ John ]  }

or more specifically:

{  { { 2002 [ Yr ] } { 2007 [ Yr ] } [ =/= ] }
            [ politics [ John ] ]  }

Now we are informed that John has changed politically between years 2002 and 2007 — possibly his views have changed, or his political affiliations, or ....

dabanese, 1

The syntax of the relaxed, as well as of the strict version of dabanese is simple. Initially we have the notion of an ideogram and of the six symbols which are not ideograms, namely three kind of paretheses: ( ) { } [ ]. Both the ideograms and the six symbols are called characters. Given a phrase or a sequence of phrases A₁ ... A_n (possibly empty, when n=0), we may use them to create new phrases as follows:

1. a single ideogram is a phrase; it is also a strict phrase;


2. if A is a phrase then [A] is a phrase — it is called an emphasized phrase; If left bracket symbol [ is not the first character of A, and if A is a strict phrase then also [A] is a strict phrase (in plain language: strict dabanese allows only a single emphasis);


3. if A₁ ... A_n is a finite sequence of dabanese phrases then the concatenation
   
   { A₁ ... A_n }
   which inserts the sequence between braces, is a dabanese phrase; it is called an unordered phrase, and A₁ ... A_n are its subphrases; if none of the subphrases is emphasized then the resulting phrase is called an unordered list; if all subphrases A₁ ... A_n are strict, and if not more than one of them is emphasized, then the resulting phrase is strict;


4. if A₁ ... A_n is a finite sequence of dabanese phrases then the concatenation
   
   ( A₁ ... A_n )
   which inserts the sequence between parentheses ( ), is a dabanese phrase; it is called an ordered phrase, and A₁ ... A_n are its subphrases; if none of the subphrases is emphasized then the resulting phrase is called an ordered list; if all subphrases A₁ ... A_n are strict, and if not more than one of them is emphasized, then the resulting phrase is strict;



5. every phrase (relaxed or strict) is obtained by a finite application of the above rules.

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Now remember that it took you a couple of years to learn your native language, and another couple of years to learn your next language, ... Thus please be patient and tolerate well the first dabanese phrases, after the empty (hence invisible) phrase:

( )

{ }

The meaning of the dabanese phrases depends on the society of the dabanese folks (called dabers), just like in the case of natural languages. I am a dabanese folk, and I claim that the meaning of both above dabanese phrases is "nothingness". The difference between the two is something of a joke to me, because we have here an ordered and an unordered nothingness, but it's really the same. Continuing along such amusing lines we may also consider phrases which are not easy on eyes (but I'll help the cause by using informally the bold case):

{ ( ) [ ( ) ] }

{ [ { } ] ( ) }

They mean something like "empty nothingness" or "nothingness which is nothing". To make them easier on our eyes let's introduce pigeon ideograms () and {} (no space between the parentheses or braces) which stand for the same as dabanese phrases ( ) and { }. Then we may rewrite the above two dabaphrases as:

( () [ () ] )

{ [ {} ] () }

We may say that emphasized phrases are meaningful, as opposed to phrases which are merely lists. Thus above two phrases are meaningful — silly but meaningful formally.